In case you didn’t catch it the first time around, PicApp is a website where you can search for all sorts of premium licensed photos. The kicker is that you can freely embed any of these pictures, which come from sources like Getty Images and Jupiter Images, on your website or blog without any concern for copyright infringement. It’s all free for you to use.

Well, the team at PicApp decided to order a second review for their service, this time highlighting a slightly different set of features. You can think of the first review as an introduction and this second one as a more specific chapter in a book.

The SEO Benefits of PicApp

As you know, search engine optimization can play a major role in the success of your website or blog. You want to rank well in the search engines for your target keywords and keyword phrases, but how can using images from PicApp help?

Sifting through the official PicApp blog, you can read a post on exactly this topic. More specifically, the PicApp team says that using their images can be like using “a real SEO steroid.”

That’s because each of the images that you embed from PicApp come preloaded with “in-depth and professional metadata and captions.” As you know, having an SEO-friendly file name, along with good “alt” and “title” text can go a long way in helping Google understand exactly which keywords it should associate with your image.

Even if you’re not a site that is particularly focused on images, you have to recognize that over 10% of searches online are being conducted for images. The Google Image Search utility is used extensively by just about everyone. If you can rank there and someone clicks on the embedded image of John Mayer, guess whose site shows up in the lower frame? Yup, that could be yours.

Should the site visitor find that your website or blog provides more useful information or other related photos, they just might stick around or even bookmark your page. The higher quality images from PicApp will certainly help in that respect too.

Can you achieve similar results with your own photos? Of course you can, but you will need to spend the time to create your own high-quality pictures (or hire a photographer) and you’ll need to write your own in-depth metadata to accompany them (or hire a writer). Even then, you probably would not be able to get your own shots of Barack Obama and Taylor Swift… but PicApp can provide thousands of those for you.

A Noteworthy Endorsement from Blogger

In my first review, I noted how PicApp got an official endorsement from the WordPress.com community and how there was a plug-in to work with self-hosted WordPress.org installations. PicApp plays friendly with other platforms too, but it got a noteworthy endorsement from the Blogger.com crew too.

Going through the official help documents for Blogger, you’ll find one entry that discusses using images from the web. In addition to a paragraph on “stealing” bandwidth, it also talks about copyrighted materials.

In it, Google says that “if you’re unsure whether or not an image is copyrighted, it’s best not to risk it. However, there are places that make it easier for you to find images you’re allowed to use.” The first place listed is PicApp. It’s a full two slots above the Flickr Creative Commons search. That’s a big achievement!

I don’t think I’m supposed to say anything just yet, but I hear that PicApp will have another major announcement to make early next year. Stay tuned for that.

Yea, it’s true that putting the right meta data would help in SEO. I have a health blog and use at least one image in every single post, and most of my traffic from images search though. But it may take you some times to write a great description and title for every images though.

Neat. Pic app seems very good. I actually tweeted your first post on picapp and got a reply from a photographer that wasn’t all too happy with it – stating it was making it harder for photographers to make a living.

What are your thoughts on that. How does picapp compensate the professional photographers out there? How is it making money?

Speaking as a photographer / illustrator myself, I know that the “big guys” at Getty, Corbis etc will not be happy about it. Same happened as Istock invented Microstock, but on the other hand it also increases their visibility and gets their name out, SY

Wrong, first our images are not shit, second a copyright infringement can cost you serious $$$$$ depending how you use the image / if you earn any money with help of this image. The wild-west days of the internet are over! SY

I also recommend Pixlr as a compliment which brings you an online image and photo editing program and tools, free!

Maybe you need a program to do some touching up of a picture, or perhaps you want to do some more involved cutting, cropping, brushing up, or reconfiguring of a picture yet you cannot afford the $800 Photoshop program or need something so advanced. Well now there is a web-site that has a free photo shop like on-line imaging editing and manipulation tool and you can check it out by following this link:

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